Systematic Analysis of DDS Implementations

Publish-subscribe messaging is a popular communication paradigm in the (Industrial) Internet of Things, and the Data Distribution Service (DDS) is a well known standard for pub-sub communication middleware. Many vendor implementations of DDS exist, leaving users with the need to choose according to project and performance requirements. However, the wide range of parameters in DDS implementations not covered in the standard specification make this selection difficult and time-consuming. We present DDS-Perf, a novel and versatile cross-vendor benchmarking tool for performance analysis, and use it to provide data from studies on 4 popular DDS implementations (OpenDDS, RTI Connext, FastDDS and CycloneDDS) across a wide range of experimental setups. DDS-Perf allows us to provide a consistent methodology across all vendors, increasing fairness and comparability. Overall, we find that RTI Connext achieves the best all-round performance (exhibiting the best bandwidth and peak sample rate), while FastDDS (best end-to-end latency) and CycloneDDS also show promising results.